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This is a running record of a 6-month engagement — a new month is added here as it wraps.
The first month of any SEO & AI search engagement is intentionally quiet on the surface. Before we change a single word on your website, we need to know exactly how Google and AI tools like ChatGPT currently see it, and what future guests are actually searching for. Here's everything that happened behind the scenes in August, and what it sets up for September.
We did a deep, page-by-page study of all 14 of your core pages — Rooms & Suites, Dining, Spa & Wellness, Weddings & Events, and the Local Guide — to see how Google currently understands and categorizes each one, and how that compares to what travelers researching Asheville are actually typing into search.
The audit showed several pages aren't titled the way travelers search. Example: your Mountain View Suite page is titled just that — but the data points to "Mountain View Suites, Asheville NC." We've mapped a new, localized primary keyword for each of the 14 pages, ready to roll into the page titles, headlines, and intro copy.
Travelers are increasingly asking ChatGPT and Google AI Overviews questions instead of typing them into a search bar. We built 64 real, traveler-style questions across your key experiences — things like "what's the best pet-friendly hotel near the Blue Ridge Parkway?" — and we're now tracking, in real time, how often Hotel Almanac gets mentioned and cited in those AI answers.
We completed a full technical SEO audit of the site and booking flow. The site's in decent shape overall — we flagged two items to correct: the property is missing proper hotel structured data ("schema"), so search engines can't confidently show your rooms, rates, and reviews, and the booking widget is adding real load time to your highest-intent pages.
Every month, a report like this speaks to these five areas — the same categories laid out in our standard monthly retainer.
SEO and AI search compound rather than spike. The first month or two build the foundation — audits, fixes, strategy. Ranking and traffic movement typically becomes visible from month three onward, which is part of why our retainers are structured as six-month engagements.
Will appear here once September's work is complete.
